The Dawn of Earth Day

How the world's largest secular holiday was born. And what we've learned 41 years later.

The heavens welcomed Earth Day to America. All over the country, April 22, 1970, dawned clear and sunny; mild weather made it even easier to bring people into the streets.

The Capitol Mall was packed, and so many members
of Congress were making speeches and appearing at events
that both houses adjourned for the day.

Mayors, governors, aldermen, village trustees, elementary
school kids, Boy Scout troops, labor unions, college
radicals, and even business groups participated. In fact, the
only organization in the nation that actively opposed Earth
Day was the Daughters of the American Revolution, which
warned ominously that “subversive elements plan to make
American children live in an environment that is good for
them.”

By nightfall, more than 20 million people had participated
in the First National Environmental Teach-In, as the
event was formally known. It established the environmental
movement in the United States and helped spur the passage
of numerous laws and the creation of hundreds of activist
groups.

Earth Day Spokane

Jessica Anundon, coordinator of Earth Day Spokane, says the event is
divided into five categories: active stewardship, local foods, conservation
and energy, sustainable community and alternative transportation. For
each category, there are local organizations and businesses ready with a variety
of information and activities aimed at educating the community. Anundon says
this year there is a special focus on kids, with activities like planting flowers and making refrigerator magnets. Kids will also be given a passport they can fill out as they pass through each of the five categories, earning them raffle tickets for a bike.

While there’s plenty for the little ones, adults are taken care of as well.
At 4 pm, all the booths will pack up and live music will start. Anundon says
they’ve got a “very eclectic” variety — from folk to punk — taking to the stage
on Main Avenue. Beginning at 6 pm, another stage in the Community Building
Warehouse will host the Earth Dance featuring electronic music and go-go
dancers. Everyone aged 16 and older is welcome, and prizes will be awarded for
best Earth Day costumes. (Tiffany Harms)

It was, by almost all accounts, a phenomenal success,
an event that dwarfed the largest single-day civil rights and
antiwar demonstrations of the era — and the person who
ran it, 25-year-old Denis Hayes, wasn’t happy.

His concern with the nascent movement back then says
a lot about where environmentalism is 41 years later.

Gaylord Nelson, a mild-mannered U.S. senator from
Wisconsin, came up with the idea of Earth Day on a flight
from Santa Barbara to Oakland. Nelson was the kind of
guy who doesn’t get elected to the Senate these days — a
polite, friendly small-town guy who was anything but a
firebrand.

A balding, 52-year-old World War II veteran who
survived Okinawa, Nelson was a Democrat and generally
a liberal vote, but he got along fine with the die-hard
conservatives. He kept a fairly low profile, and did a lot of
his work behind the scenes.

But long before it was popular, Nelson was an ardent
environmentalist — and he was always looking for ways to
bring the future of the planet into the popular consciousness.

In August 1969, Nelson was on a West Coast speaking
tour — and one of his mandatory stops was the small coastal
city that seven months earlier had become ground zero for
the environmental movement. Indeed, a lot of historians say
that Earth Day 1970 was the coming out party for modern
environmentalism — but the spark that made it possible, the
event that turned observers into activists, took place Jan. 28,
1969, in Santa Barbara.

Elsewhere

MOSCOW CLEANUP DAY

Celebrate Earth Day with the city of Moscow, the Chamber of Commerce
and University of Idaho students and clean up the city on April 22 at 9 am.
Friendship Square, downtown Moscow, Idaho (208-883-7122)

SANDPOINT EARTH DAY FESTIVAL

Enjoy vendors, food, beer and wine, electric car demonstrations, presentations by more than 20 local conservation groups and listen to a talk by an original Earth Day organizer, Doug Scott, on April 22 from 4-8 pm. Sandpoint Events Center, 102 S. Euclid Ave., Sandpoint, Idaho (208-265-9565)

ART AT THE MARKET

Celebrate Earth Day with local vendors, an art show and an auction that
explores the theme “Clean Water” on April 21 from 3-8 pm. South Perry Farmers
Market, 11th and Perry St. (509-230-8778)

COEUR D'ALENE EARTH DAY

About 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, a photographer
from the Santa Barbara News Press got the word that
something had gone wrong on one of the Union Oil
drilling platforms in the channel just offshore. The platforms
were fairly new — the federal government had sold
drilling rights in the area in February 1968 for $603 million,
and Union was in the process of drilling its fourth offshore
well. The company had convinced the U.S. Geological
Survey to relax the safety rules for underwater rigs, saying
there was no threat of a spill.

But shortly after the drill bit struck oil 3,478 feet beneath
the surface, the rig hit a snag — and when the workers
got the equipment free, oil began exploding out. Within
two weeks, more than 3 million gallons of California crude
was on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, and a lot of it had
washed ashore, fouling the pristine beaches of Santa Barbara
and fueling an angry popular backlash nationwide.

Nelson received an overwhelming reception at his Santa
Barbara talk — and horrified as he was by the spill, he was
glad that an environmental concern was suddenly big news.
But he still wasn’t sure what the next steps ought to be —
until, bored on an hour-long flight to his next speech in
Berkeley, he picked up a copy of Ramparts magazine.

The radical left publication, once described as having “a
bomb in every issue,” wasn’t Nelson’s typical reading material.
But this particular issue was devoted to a new trend
on college campuses — day-long “teach-ins” on the Vietnam
War.

Huh, Nelson thought. A teach-in. That’s an intriguing
idea.

Denis Hayes — the 25-year-old who would ended up
running the first Earth Day — was a student in the prestigious
joint program in law and public policy at Harvard.
He’d been something of a campus activist, protesting
against the war, but hadn’t paid much attention to environmental
issues. He needed a public-interest job of some sort
for a class project, though, so when he read a newspaper
article about the senator who was planning a national
environmental teach-in, he called and offered to organize
the effort in Boston. Nelson invited him to Washington, was
impressed by his Harvard education and enthusiasm, and
hired him to run the whole show.

The senator was very clear from the start: the National
Environmental Teach-In would not be a radical Vietnamstyle
protest. The event would be nonpartisan, polite, and
entirely legal. Hayes and his staffers chafed a bit at the rules
(and the two Senate staffers Nelson placed in the Earth Day
office to keep an eye on things), and they ultimately set up a
separate nonprofit called the Environmental Action Foundation
to take more aggressive stands on issues.

Meanwhile, Hayes did the job he was hired to do — and
did it well. Everywhere he turned, from small towns to big
corporations, people wanted to plug in, to be a part of the
first Earth Day. Many wanted to do nice, noncontroversial
projects: In Knoxville, Tenn., students decided to scour
rivers and streams for trash to see if they could each clean
up the five pounds of garbage the average American threw
away each day. In dozens of communities, people organized
tree-plantings. In New York, Mayor John Lindsay led a
parade down Fifth Avenue.

A few of the actions were more dramatic. A few protesters
smashed a car to bits, and in Boston, 200 people carried
coffins into Logan International Airport in a symbolic “diein”
against airport expansion. In Omaha, Neb., so many
college students walked around in gas masks that the stores
ran out. But it was, Hayes realized, an awful lot of talk and
not a lot of action. The participants were also overwhelmingly
white and middle-class.

Hayes wasn’t the only one feeling that way. In New
York, author Kurt Vonnegut, speaking from a platform
decorated with a giant paper sunflower, added a note of cynicism.

“Here we are again, the peaceful demonstrators,”
he said, “mostly young and mostly white.
Good luck to us, for I don’t know what sporting
event the president [Richard Nixon] may be watching
at the moment. He should help us make a fit
place for human beings to live. Will he do it? No.
So the war will go on. Meanwhile, we go up and
down Fifth Avenue, picking up trash.”

Hayes finally broke with the politics of his
mentor early on Earth Day morning when it was
too late to fire him. The next day, the National
Environmental Teach-In office would close and the
organization would shut down. From that moment
on, he could say what he liked and not worry who
he offended.

“I suspect,” he told a crowd gathered at the
Capitol Mall, “that the politicians and businessmen
who are jumping on the environmental bandwagon
don’t have the slightest idea what they are getting
into. They are talking about filters on smokestacks
while we are challenging corporate irresponsibility.
They are bursting with pride about plans for totally inadequate municipal sewage plants. We are
challenging the ethics of a society that, with only
6 percent of the world’s population, accounts for
more than half the world’s annual consumption of
raw materials.

“We are building a movement,” he continued,
“a movement with a broad base, a movement that
transcends traditional political boundaries. It is a
movement that values people more than technology
and political ideologies, people more than profit.

“It will be a difficult fight. Earth Day is the
beginning.”

I first met Hayes in 1990, near the office in Palo
Alto where he was planning the 20th anniversary
of Earth Day. He’d continued his environmental
work inside and outside government, at
one point running the National Energy Laboratory
under President Jimmy Carter. Earth Day 20 was
shaping up as a gigantic event, one that would
ultimately involve 200 million people around the
globe. Earth Day was becoming the largest secular
holiday on the planet.

Hayes was excited about the event, which he
was running this time without the moderating influence
of a U.S. senator. And he was aiming for a
much more activist message — in fact, at that point,
he was pretty clear that the U.S. environmental
movement was running out of time.

“Twenty years ago, Earth Day was a protest movement,” he told a crowd of more than 300,000
in Washington, D.C. “We no longer have time to
protest. The most important problems facing our
generation will be won or lost in the next 10 years.
We cannot protest our losses. We have to win.”

And now another 20 years have passed — and
by many accounts, we are not winning. Climate
change continues, and even accelerates; an attempt
at a global accord failed; and Congress can’t even
pass a mild, watered-down bill to limit carbon emissions.

And Hayes thinks the movement has a serious
problem. “Earth Day has succeeded in being the
ultimate big tent,” he told me by phone. “To some
rather great extent, it had some measure of success.”

But he noted that “in American politics these
days, it’s not the breadth of support, it’s the
intensity that matters. Environmentalists tend to be
broadly progressive people who care about war and
the economy and health care. They aren’t singleissue
voters. And somehow, the political intensity is
missing.”

Hayes isn’t advocating that environmentalists forget about everything else and ignore all the other
issues — or that the movement lose its broad-based
appeal — but he said it’s time to bring political
leaders and policies under much, much sharper
scrutiny and to “stop accepting a voting record of
80 percent.”

It’s hard today to be bipartisan, and compromise
is unacceptable, Hayes told me. “I was
probably right [in 1990],” he said. “If what you’re
aspiring to do is stop the greenhouse gases before
they do significant damage to the environment, it’s
too late.” At this point, he said, it’s all about keeping
the damage from turning into a widespread ecological
disaster.

“I would like to see Earth Day 50 be a celebration,”
he said. “I would like to see by then a real
price on carbon, nuclear power not proliferating,
and a profound, stable investment in cost-effective,
distributed renewable energy.” But for that to
happen, “we need to have a very intense core of
environmental voters who realize that these threats
to life on the planet are more important than a lot
of other things.”

Tim Redmond is the author, with Marc Mowrey,
of Not In Our Back Yard: The People and Events
that Shaped America’s Modern Environmental
Movement. A version of this article first appeared
in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.